by P. H. Newby
“I think you’re fine.” He had even tried to pat her arm, because she had seemed to grow more and more excited. “You’ve been through a rough patch. Things will be all right.”
She had actually thrown what was left of her champagne in his face; not much, but enough to startle. “Don’t talk like that. What the hell, who d’you think you are to talk to me about my life? You’ve no call to be so superior. You’re not so smart. Being despised by a guy like you, really that’s the end! Of course you despise me. Don’t lie to me. Be honest with yourself. Relax! Give yourself the benefit of a bit of truth. You know what that is? It’s looking at things for what they are. If you want to feel good with yourself, and clean inside, all you’ve got to say to me is, ‘Yes, certainly, an easy lay like you, of course I despise you.’”
He had even wondered whether she would calm down if he said precisely that. “You ought to go to bed. You’ve had a day. We can talk about this some other time if you want.”
“No, we won’t say any more about this. It’s all finished. I just forbid you to mention the subject again. You understand that. I’ve certain thoughts of my own and I just want to be left with them. You don’t think I’m going to dream about you for the rest of my life, do you? Hell, how cocky can a man get? No, there’s only one think I’d ask. I’d like to meet you in the real world.”
“Isn’t this real?”
“Port Said?” She laughed noisily. “I mean London, or the States, where I’m living an ordinary life. You wouldn’t recognise me.”
“You mean you wouldn’t know me?”
He could not blame her for wanting to think well of herself. He had come to feel the same sort of need himself. Honestly, though, he thought it went deeper in his case. He wanted to feel clean.
So when she came over to him in the boat and they sat so close their thighs rubbed he patted her on a knee he happened to notice exposed, and said, “You don’t have to worry about me. I think you’re tops. That’s the way I’ll always think of you. When you get straightened out you might send me a photo. I’d like a photo of you, you know that?”
“No, look, I want to talk to you. I’ve got something to tell you. We won’t get separated, will we?”
“One thing I’ve always meant to ask you. About ten years ago were you ever on the beach at Port Said when a soldier fell off a horse?”
“I can’t remember. Why?”
“I’ve always wondered.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Go and look after the old girl, that’ll be a real kindness.”
Leah shrugged.
Mrs K was standing up and the chaplain was actually having to hold her with his right hand. He held the Prayer Book open in his left. The nuns were looking down towards Townrow now, with the sun full on their faces, all pale and pimply. As the boat rose and fell one of the brass handles on the coffin winked like a semaphore, so it could not have been so damp in that earth, Townrow thought.
“We can’t go on with it. It’ll float,” Townrow shouted.
“Eh?” The chaplain lowered his Prayer Book in astonishment.
“It’ll float. We put him over the side it’ll be like launching a boat.”
“Oh, dear. What are we going to do? Are you sure?”
“Put a sail on it and it’d fetch up in Lebanon.”
The chaplain was bending his head to hear what Mrs K was saying.
“She says that’s his home. He would be going home to Beirut. But no.” He turned back to her. “This is out of the question. How would you fix a sail to a coffin? We haven’t the materials.”
They were lurching about sufficiently near a British destroyer for Townrow to shout, “Funeral party here. You got any old iron we could tie to the coffin?”
An officer on the bridge waved back, obviously thinking it was some sort of joke. Townrow went on shouting until another officer, who seemed more quick-witted, climbed to the bridge and began talking to them in a loud-hailer. “Put her over the side and we’ll give her a burst with a machine gun.”
Mrs K made her way along, steadying herself by putting one hand on the coffin, while Leah supported her by the other arm. Townrow was still sitting at the tiller and when she stood immediately in front of him she bent down. Her face was no more than six inches from his. Her mouth worked as though she was pushing her dentures about with her tongue. She peered at him. Her rage seemed to make her short-sighted. If she decided to spit at him he was not going to duck. The brilliant sun brought out every line on her face and left it colourless. When eventually she spoke she made her mouth small, she was so bitter. “Don’t you think I’d been through enough? I was a fool to agree to this. If you could have brought him back from the dead to outface me you’d have done it. This was the nearest you could get. Are you satisfied now?”
The honest answer was no. Given her determination not to leave Elie and his own decision not to abandon her, the only way he could follow Leah was to dig the old man up and bring him along. To make a real party of it. But the old girl was right. He was not satisfied.
He grabbed her and forced her down to his side where she occupied the seat where Leah had been. “I’m sorry, you old fool. God knows, I’m sorry,” he said, and kissed her on the top of her head.
“The Devil could not have thought of anything more awful.”
The boat was rolling. The way people seemed to be rushing about in it Townrow thought there was a good chance of their capsizing unless they got under way again. He wanted Leah to go back and haul up the sail but he had only to look at her and see the strained, concentrated manner she was watching him to realise she could have made nothing at all of this escapade. Certainly she did not know that it was all, in a manner of speaking, in her honour.
“No, I’m not satisfied,” he said in what he hoped was a comforting tone to Mrs K, “I’ve made a balls up.”
At any other time she might have said he was vulgar. That morning she was past it. Townrow squeezed her. They ought to have stayed in Port Said. Elie ought to have stayed in Port Said. He had been confused.
“We’ll make for one of the big ships, and they’ll give you a decent funeral, you see if they don’t, with weights,” he said, and shouted to Leah and the chaplain to hoist the sail.
If ever Townrow reached a place where somebody was ready to sit down and listen he would not have known how to tell this story. How could he tell it without seeming stupid or crazy? He might have blamed the times. When you were caught up in extraordinary events you did extraordinary things, even monstrous things like digging up a dead man and carrying him out to sea. He would never be able to persuade anyone he had done it merely to get Mrs K out of the town. He had only to look at her in her steel-rimmed glasses and her white shawl with her grey, thin hair now beginning at last to escape from its pins and blow about, to know he could never say he had exhumed Elie to save her skin.
It could not have been to impress Leah. She had been appalled when she first realised what was happening. At first she refused to step into the boat. She had looked at the coffin and then turned and looked at Townrow with an expression of real horror on her face. Townrow had to bundle her into the boat but even then she might have climbed out again if the British Military Police hadn’t started shouting. She made Townrow feel he had been caught out in some disgusting abnormality, cannibalism or ritual murder. She got used to it. Their situation was so extraordinary. Townrow guessed they had, all of them, Mrs K, Leah, the nuns, the lot, reached a point where they would accept any kind of weird behaviour without too much shock.
So he hadn’t dug Elie up and used him like some reeking bait to entice his widow out of her lair and so make a good impression on Leah! She wouldn’t have worried if Mrs K had been left behind.
Townrow would not, either, be able to make his behaviour seem reasonable by saying he had once dreamed it all. Or it was a false memory. What sort of reasonableness was that? At best he could say the dream or some obscure recollection put this particular tri
p in his mind. At that moment it seemed to him just a way to be with Leah, the only way he could honourably be out there, in that rocking boat, protracting the time they had spent together.
And the absurd thing was this great vulgar gesture was all for nothing. He was not able to see more than thirty minutes ahead with any certainty. Beyond was no Leah. They were not to go on together. He needed too much to take a grip on himself and by himself to feel equal to any human company for some time, still less Leah’s. And yet he did not want her to forget. One way he might explain himself was in this yearning for her not to forget him. The parting would be spectacular. She would not forget this parting.
He was not even sure whether his deeper yearning was that she would forget. He guessed he had done this absurd thing because when men want to run in opposite directions at the same time they compromise by some idiocy. They were all out in this boat, Mrs K, himself, Elie, because Leah was drawing them after her. She pulled them out to sea because that was the way she was going, like the one wild duck at the tip of some arrow of ducks, flying God knows where.
On the port side the destroyer had a gang ladder lowered so no doubt one of these landing craft was expected. This was one reason why the officer with the load-hailer was angry when Townrow gave signs of bringing his craft alongside. He yelled a warning to keep clear. Townrow took no notice with the result that when he brought up at the ladder a couple of armed sailors with H. M.S. Spiker on their hatbands were waiting. What looked like a petty officer with a huge revolver in a canvas holster came out and started shouting.
“What’s the game, then? Who are you?” Then he noticed the chaplain. “You’ll have to get that boat out of the way. We’re taking on men at any moment.”
“British subjects,” Townrow shouted. “Evacuated from Port Said. We were making for the U.K. But we’ve got to have a funeral. Besides, I don’t think she’s going to stay afloat.”
The sail had come down and the nuns were holding on to the gang ladder, laughing excitedly. They pointed at their wicker baskets. They had little English—they were Maltese—and cried, “Please, please,” looking up at the sailors and laughing and pointing. The morning reeked of oil as much as salt water.
By this time the chaplain had climbed the gang ladder and was standing on the deck talking to yet another officer who had appeared and was now looking down at the boat, and the coffin.
Townrow thought he could scarcely refuse to take British subjects aboard. This would include the Maltese. He would take Leah too. But the chaplain would have to be eloquent to persuade him to accept Elie. Very likely, Townrow thought, he would be told to take his coffin to some other place, and he would. Once he had rid himself of the other passengers he saw himself sailing on until the boat sank or he fetched up on some coast. This was something the old girl would not stand for, if he still had Elie on board. She would want to come too.
The chaplain clambered down the gang ladder.
“The lieutenant says he wants the lid off to see what’s inside. I know this is upsetting,” he said to Mrs K, “but we’re caught up in a war. He asked me if I could swear to what was in the coffin and I had to say no.”
“No, no, no, no, for God’s sake, no.”
“It might be—I don’t know what? An explosive. They wouldn’t want that risk.”
“There’s no explosive.” Mrs K was weary. She closed her eyes and Townrow watched her face rising and falling against the grey flank of the ship; the expression was of complete repose, she might even have been quite genuinely asleep, but certainly set apart from that particular situation. He wondered where, in her mind, she had floated off to. Himself, he was thinking of the day they first met, when he had fallen off that horse in front of the Khoury beach hut and Elie had given him a glass of fruit juice. There she was, sitting at the back of the hut, looking as though she really wished he had broken his neck. She had never liked or trusted him.
The clacking nuns, showing a length of stocking as white as their faces, were clambering on to the gang ladder, handing baskets and suitcases to the sailors. Leah went too.
“Now what?” Half way up the ladder she was near enough to Townrow to speak without having to lift her voice. “What are you sitting there for? Aren’t you coming?”
“Not this trip. You go on. Nice to have known you.”
“They could spill some kerosene over the boat. It would burn like a torch, and everything in it.” Extraordinary, how quietly Leah was able to talk and yet make herself understood. They were out at sea, surrounded by battleships, men were shouting, planes were scorching overhead, yet she talked with so much intimacy they might have been in bed. “I thought you were mad. I knew you were mad when you came out of Port Said dragging a corpse. It’s horrible. You don’t seem to understand what you did. It’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever heard of. Anybody would think you wanted to drive Mrs Khoury crazy too. Well, did you? You might have succeeded at that. If anybody digs up my husband when he’s dead and tries to tie him to my tail, do you know what I’d do? But it couldn’t happen in the States. Are you coming? You could get the Navy pour some oil or something on the boat and the coffin and it would be a real funeral pyre.”
“I’m not coming, Leah.”
She hesitated. “You know, I sometimes think there’s some good reason you didn’t go back to England before.”
“I cover up pretty well. The police would find it hard to prove.”
“Why can’t you be serious? You might have said the reason was me, at least. You might never see me again.”
She went on up the ladder to the deck, followed by Mrs K, supported by the chaplain and a sailor, just as two other sailors started on the coffin with hammers and chisels.
Townrow yelled at them to stop. They paused and looked at him with their mouths open.
“O.K. You can carry on,” he said, as soon as Mrs K had disappeared on board and been led off, presumably, to some cabin. The boat had been tied up to the gang ladder so Townrow could get up now and walk about. “For God’s sake! I want to see what’s in that box as much as you do. What are you waiting for?”
The nails screamed in the wood as they prised up the lid. Townrow was breaking into his dream. He had been here before. An oil patch slid past, winking green and blue, at a peculiar angle to the horizon. The steel hull, blue water, sky and the brown coffin lay in more planes than a three dimensional world permitted; the coffin, in particular, seemed to stick right out of its background and to grow bigger as he watched it. Faces looked down from the deck. Men stood on the stairs. Townrow held on a rope and inspected the face that was now exposed. It seemed huge. He could not understand how it belonged in the same picture with everything else in sight. It was just as though he had been looking at a trick painting of water and boats and men where the artist had played games with perspective and shown objects in relation to one another in a way not possible in nature; then through the canvas had come thrusting this dead, eyeless, black and grizzle-bearded skull.
“You satisfied?” he shouted up to the officer with the canvas holster.
Townrow did not care, now, how long they all stood there. The experience was not quite as he remembered it. There was no cross and the face was a different colour. The sailors were dressed differently. But essentially it was the same dream he had climbed back into and he did not mind how long they waited, just meditating on the fact. If there were parts of your mind you kept returning to, as he had returned to this, you ought to have a good look at it and make a note of the details. Next time they might be different. Seeing all that hair had been a bit of a shock.
“What was that?” The sailors were on the point of replacing the lid but Townrow stepped forward and looked down at the dead face. He had a crazy idea the lips moved.
The chap with the loud-hailer up on the bridge must have received some message because he said, “You can bring it up. I want that gangway clear in two minutes. We’ve a landing craft coming up directly. Come on now!”
The lips were as dead and black as leather. The eyes were gummed shut. If any words had been uttered that would have been a new twist. Even imagining them was a new twist. Townrow saw himself floating in and out of this dream for the rest of his life, and each time there would be a new twist. Next time there would be no nuns and the warship would be American. There would be times when there was a cross on the dead man’s chest and there would be times when there was not. The terrible thing about the form this particular dream took was the longing. Townrow looked up and saw Leah at the rail. That was the real innovation this time. Parting. Goodbye.
If the lips had not actually moved, if words had not really been uttered, at least they had sneered. It’s all in aid of nothing. You’ve been duped. That was the message.
Leah was calling down to him but there was so much noise going on he could not make out what she was saying. He saw how white her knuckles were on the rail.
“Get that boat away,” the loud-hailer was saying. The sailors already had the coffin half way up the gang ladder. The lid was lying on top loosely. Townrow supposed they would now put the sneering effigy into a loaded canvas bag and dump it decently over the side while the chaplain said a few words and Mrs K stood by having a cry.
Leah understood for the first time that Townrow himself was not coming on board. She tried to push her way past some sailors and make her way down the gang ladder but they grabbed her. She made a fuss about this. She was not the girl to like restraint at the best of times. Townrow saw how red her face had gone. She was actually hitting at one of these sailors. Everyone was laughing except her, and Townrow.
His mind seemed to be draining away. He could not understand why he had done nothing about that assurance from those sneering lips. You are stupid. They were Elie’s lips all right, in spite of the whiskers. Townrow had heard about hair growing after death but it was the first time he had seen it. He took the sneer to be an authentic message. It had authority behind it. But he was not acting on it. He was not going on board that destroyer to be with that woman. Sure, he wanted to be with her. Judging by the way she was fighting off the sailors it was what she wanted too. Nothing rated, nothing cut deep, nothing signified. So, follow your nose. Relax, please yourself, do what you want. That was the message from Elie.